Nobody Told Me Job Searching Would Make Me a Better Developer

You know what I thought job searching was? Sending applications. Refreshing my inbox. Waiting. That's it.

Turns out it's been one of the best learning periods of my career, and I didn't even sign up for that part.

Here's what actually happens. You read a job description and there's some word in there you kind of know but don't really know. So you look it up. Then you read about it. Then you're like, okay let me actually try building something with it. And suddenly you're three tabs deep genuinely learning a thing you'd been nodding along to for years without fully getting.

Do that over and over, across dozens of postings, and something clicks. You start seeing what the market actually wants. You stop guessing and start noticing patterns.

And yeah, I won't pretend it's all great. There are days it makes you feel behind, like everyone else got the memo and you're still catching up. Everybody in this spot feels that. But here's the part that surprised me: chasing all those unfamiliar terms sent me back to the foundations, and I understand them deeper now than I did when I was comfortably employed and never had a reason to question what I knew.

So if you're in the search right now and it's wearing on you: you're probably learning more than you're giving yourself credit for. Keep a note of every rabbit hole you go down. You'll be surprised what you picked up.

And I'm not going to even go through what I've learned from interview questions. You go back home and you look up and you're like, "Ahhhhhh!!!!!!!". Well let's keep that one for another day.